Refugees flee Uzbekistan after a military crackdown in the town of Andijan in 2005.
Photograph: Vaycheslav Oseledko/AFP/Getty Images

At first glance, Kalmar is an archetypal Swedish town. It has a picturesque centre and fastidiously clean cobbled streets lined with old wooden buildings. But the town is unusual in one respect: it is home to hundreds of Uzbek refugees harbouring a secret.

The majority of Uzbeks in Kalmar come from Andijan, the scene of a mass protest and subsequent massacre a decade ago. They fled to Sweden out of fear that the Uzbek president, Islam Karimov, whose regime is ranked among the most repressive on earth, would imprison or harass them if they stayed.

Ten years after Uzbek security forces broke up the demonstrations by firing into the crowd with automatic weapons, killing more than 1,000 people, survivors now living in Kalmar are still traumatised. They refuse to speak publicly about what they experienced on 13 May 2005, apparently still concerned that the Uzbek government can and will retaliate – either against them or their relatives back home.

“There is such a climate of fear, generally, that it is very difficult to get people to speak up and to make sure that nothing happens to them once they have spoken to you,” said Amnesty International’s Maisy Weicherding, who co-wrote Secrets and Lies: Forced Confessions Under Torture in Uzbekistan, a report detailing systematic torture and other human rights abuses in the country, where an estimated 12,000 people are thought to be detained on politically motivated charges.

Andijan witnesses even seem reluctant to trust other Uzbek refugees in Kalmar. A man who identified himself by a pseudonym, Jaloliddin Rashidov, said his political activism forced him to flee Uzbekistan in 2004. He lived in Ukraine before resettling with his family in Sweden in 2006. He said that even after years of acquaintanceship, refugees from Andijan still will not open up to him.

“They are a little bit scared talking about … Andijan and the Uzbek government,” Rashidov said. “They do not want their relatives who were left behind [in Uzbekistan] to be hurt or get in trouble.”

Rashidov acknowledged that concerns about the long arm of the Uzbek security forces are not misplaced. Rights watchdogs claim Karimov’s regime is notorious for pursuing Uzbek critics abroad, going so far as to kidnap and assassinate some of them. In 2012 one of Uzbekistan’s most prominent Islamic clerics in exile, Obidkhon Qori Nazarov, was shot multiple times in the stairway of his apartment building in the Swedish village Strömsund. He survived the apparent assassination attempt, but was in a coma for almost two years. His family now lives in hiding.

Another prominent Uzbek imam who was critical of Karimov’s policies, Abdullah Bukhari, was shot and killed in exile Istanbul in 2014.

Uzbek women protest against the massacre in London in 2006. Photograph: Odd Andersen/AFP/Getty Images

Officials in Sweden and Turkey suspect Russian intelligence operatives, working with Uzbek authorities, may have played a part in the two attacks.

Amnesty International also believes Uzbek authorities are working with Russia. Uzbek exiles in Moscow are especially vulnerable to what rights activists call “extra-territorial repression”, Weicherding said.

“I am certainly very aware of [the Uzbek security services] monitoring people in exile,” she said. “We have long had really serious concerns about Russia. Uzbekistani security service [agents] openly abduct [exiles] from the streets of Moscow … and just take them straight back to Uzbekistan.”

Silence has not always shrouded the events in Andijan. In the weeks after the massacre, competing narratives emerged. Uzbek authorities insisted that armed Islamic militants instigated the uprising, forcing government troops to use violence to maintain order. But researchers from Human Rights Watch issued an exhaustive report showing the protest was spurred by popular discontent with local economic policies.

“The scale of this killing was so extensive, and its nature was so indiscriminate and disproportionate, that it can best be described as a massacre,” the report stated.

A woman caught up in the security crackdown after a popular uprising in Andijan in 2005. Photograph: Efrem Lukatsky/AP

According to some estimates, as many as 1,500 people were killed. The official government death toll is 187, although authorities refused to allow an independent investigation.

In the years immediately following, exile groups mounted anniversary protests across Europe and the US, and witnesses regularly were quoted in media reports. But over the last five years, amid the ratcheting up of government repression, the exile community has gone quiet. .

One former Andijan resident living in Kalmar, who spoke on condition of anonymity, refused to describe details of what he saw that day. He did, however, explain why exiles do not want to discuss Andijan anymore.

“For many of us it was a personal decision. No one told us not to talk anymore. But there are problems. We still have relatives in Andijan and we are afraid for them. They [Uzbek security agents] can even just come and shoot you in your own stairwell. That is why we decided several years ago not to have any more interviews,” he said.

Centuries ago, Andijan was a hub on the fabled Silk Road trade route linking Asia and Europe; these days, it is a somewhat gritty industrial city of about 350,000. With its desert-like climate, the city seems poles apart from Kalmar for Uzbek refugees.

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In 2004, the year before the massacre, Sweden had 441 recorded Uzbek refugees. That number more than doubled to 964 in 2005, and today stands at 3,477.

Another refugee in Kalmar said that for many of his compatriots, the difficulties of making a new life in exile had proven disillusioning.

“No one trusts anyone right now. No one trusts the democracy of Europe. No one trusts Uzbekistan. No one wants to talk with anyone,” he said, sipping coffee at a shopping mall and occasionally glancing around to check for eavesdroppers. “People just want to be quiet. No one can find a good life for us, so we have to do it ourselves.”